Until now, I’ve tried to steer clear of the “artcomics” designation. All comics, even bad ones, are instances of “art.” I suspect the term only came into being because the old term for non-corporate, non-action-adventure material, “alternative comics,” was co-opted by an actual publisher as the name of his company (he seems to be a good guy, and definitely puts out some great books, but, hey, what a sneaky trick). Instead, I’ve preferred to use the term “literary comics” when talking about graphic novels that attempt to go beyond entertainment for entertainment’s sake. For the most part, this has turned out to be unproblematic: the success or failure of graphic novels like R. Kikuo Johnson’s Night Fisher (see my review), or Manu Larcenet’s Ordinary Victories (see my review), can be evaluated along fairly traditional lines of literary critique. Does the story move? Are the themes relevant, and are they handled in a deft manner? Do the characters come alive, and are their interactions sufficiently illuminating? Is the setting made real and whole and three-dimensional (and if not, is that part of the deliberate meaning of the work, or simply a sign of shoddy craft)? Do consequences follow actions in a logical and consistent manner, within the rules the author has set for his/her world? Even the visual element of these works can be evaluated almost solely based on its ability to service the story. My own educational background (English major; several years of creative writing school) provides me with all the tools I need to work in this mode as a critic, a story-centric critic, at a reasonably competent level of discourse.
It does not, however, provide me with the tools that I need to talk about Renee French’s latest book in an educated way, because, though The Ticking
aspires to the same level of severe fineness as any literary novel, it is fundamentally not, itself, a literary expression, any more than, say, a series of captioned photographs by Duane Michaels, or a set of slogans by Jenny Holzer, flashing across a building in Times Square, can be said to be a “novel,” despite the use of carefully-constructed narrative, and bits and pieces of language, in both these examples. The narrative — the story — is actually secondary to the real meaning and impact of the work, in other words (in talking about Eddie Campbell’s latest, The Fate of the Artist, blogger Mark Fossen has said, “the overarching narrative … serves more as pretext than text,” and I think that that applies here as well, possibly moreso). If the “literary” graphic novel can be understood and talked about most effectively through the language of English class or creative writing school, maybe the “artcomic” is something that can only be evaluated properly through the language of the art gallery show after-party: those craft-conscious phrases the undergraduate art students use, like “use of negative space” and “placement of blacks,” on the most basic level, and then beyond that, the more academic, more conceptual kinds of discourse you find in the obscurest reaches of the art world, the kind that can wring meaning out of a simple canvas painted white (for example), or a bunch of trash cans arranged in a circle on a museum lawn full of Barbie dolls, dead fetuses, and Jell-O. Or something. I do not mean to disparage this stuff (at its most extreme, it is very easy to make fun of — so easy that doing so is kind of useless). I actually have quite a bit of respect for these kinds of conversations, when I can follow them. There are many mind-opening ways of thinking tucked tightly away within those boxes within boxes of babble, if you’re careful and patient and attentive, and if the people you are listening to are sincere. It’s just not the way I’m personally trained to think, or to speak. When it comes to a non-genre, non-literary work of art like The Ticking, I am left walking down the critic’s worst dead-end street: I know what I like when I see it, and I know what I don’t when I don’t, and that’s that.
So. Yeah.
The other night, I was watching Teletubbies, and for some reason, I was in the mood to take it seriously (that’s not an easy thing to do; the first impulse is to scream, “The sun has a baby face! Kill it! Kill it!”). You know how dog food is designed — its shapes and colors and textures — to appeal to the human consumer who actually pays for it, rather
than to the dog that consumes it, but is unable to express its preferences more directly in the marketplace? Teletubbies isn’t like that at all: it is designed soley for its intended consumer, the one-to-three-year-old who has no ability to control the remote. Hence the baby-faced sun (babies like looking at faces; babies also like looking at babies). If Teletubbies puts most adults in mind of a drug trip, that’s because drugs are the most convenient and popular way to alter one’s perception of reality — and the show caters to a demographic with a naturally distorted perception of reality (caused by the fact that babies’ brains, and sensory organs, are still in development, are impaired in ways, maybe, that we try to reproduce when we take recreational drugs as adults). Watching Teletubbies seriously as an adult requires an ability to step back into one’s own earliest mind, and remember a time when the world didn’t yet make sense — a time when making sense of the world, at its most fundamental level, was the only job you had in life, and it was a difficult, absorbing job. These are my fingers. I can bend them. That sort of thing. When Mommy’s face disappears behind her hands, she doesn’t really cease to exist … or does she? This mindset is not optional, if you’re going to be able to sit through the show (you’re not obliged to do so, of course — most people don’t, and don’t feel the need to).
The Ticking is kind of like that.
Like infants, artists — especially people who like to draw stuff that they see — are attempting to make sense of the world, and are therefore watching it more closely, and with much more patience and queer attention, than most of us feel is necessary, most of the time. The worst mistake in drawing is to assume you know how the parts of a thing fit together: you don’t. Your mind has introduced shortcuts in even the most basic shapes you look at every day. You have to forget your shorthand, Platonic version of, say, a chair, the one that flickers on the cave walls in your mind, and actually look at the goddam chair in front of you, to be able to draw it as it is. Substitute “world” for chair. In the same way that the chair is much more complicated after we look at it closely, than it was before, the whole world, it turns out, is much more strange than we remember. We are constantly learning this. We are constantly forgetting it. Artists and infants can’t take anything for granted — infants because they haven’t learned anything yet; artists because they have to forget and learn again, or else they’ll never really know what they thought they knew, and they’ll never be able to tell us what we didn’t realize we had, ourselves, forgotten.
The protagonist of The Ticking, Edison Steelhead, likes to draw things. In particular, he draws the kinds of small, ugly, eminently ignorable things that most people deliberately screen out: the dead flies and cigarette butts on a windowsill; the tiny twists of paper, bug legs, public hairs, and other miscellaneous little examples of blech that can be found in the hinges of a toilet seat (Edison pulls them out with tweezers — a posthumous gift from his mother, who died during his birth); the strange, penis-shaped scar on the side of his dad’s face where (I think, maybe) an eyeball used to be (long story). Some of the most interesting sequential work in the book, on a panel-by-panel basis, explains and intensifies Edison’s gaze as he narrows in on an object he wants to draw. Here is Edison, staring. Here is the scar on his dad’s face. Here is Edison’s face, in profile, and his dad’s face, in profile, to show you the spatial relationship between Edison’s gaze and the scar itself. Here is a fuller drawing of Edison’s dad’s face, so that you can see more clearly and precisely where the scar resides, and its spatial relationship to nose, eyes, mouth. And here is the drawing Edison made of the scar (complete with a diagram, over in the margins, of the scar’s placement in the world, the other objects and things that live around it). And so on. Edison watching water drip off of his own fingers. That sort of thing. Edison’s infatuation with the small and the ugly — which is the defining element of his personality, and the only thing that makes life bearable for him, maybe, given his deformed facial features — is what puts him at odds with the rest of the world, represented by his dad, who is similarly deformed, but who has dedicated himself to hiding and/or “fixing” the aesthetic imperfections that Edison chooses to investigate and celebrate. That conflict plays out almost like a regular story (but, yeah, not, um, quite). But, as mentioned before, the story doesn’t matter all that much, really. The Ticking is about drawing itself, the act of drawing — Renee French’s drawing, Edison Steelhead’s drawing — as an act of performance, as a way of engaging the world, inventing the world, defining the world, understanding the world, putting the world in its place. The drawings are all that matter; they are all that there is to this book (on the most literal level, of course, as well as the metaphorical, thematic level).
If you’re in the mood to stare at individual pages for long periods of time, allowing them to soak into your consciousness the way that a particularly sensitive three-year-old might stare at the pages of an old picture-book until every line, every shading, every subtle gesture of the artist and facial expression of the rendered characters has been memorized and internalized — then you will enjoy The Ticking a great deal. If you are willing to read it the way that an infant “reads” the world, unable to be surprised because everything, ultimately, is a surprise, unafraid of every strange turn and dangerous fall, then you will enjoy the book. If, on the other hand, you’re just looking for the quick kind of entertainment that you usually get in a graphic novel (even a literary graphic novel), well, then, you probably won’t.
Up to you, I guess.
Me? I kind of liked it.
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